John Worboys admits to four additional sex attacks

Black cab rapist John Worboys has pleaded guilty to drugging four more women.

The 62-year-old, who now goes by the name John Derek Radford, targeted women who hailed his cab and drugged them in order to sexually assault them.

He was jailed in 2009 for sex assaults on 12 women and at an Old Bailey hearing on Thursday, pleaded guilty to a string of further offences relating to four more women.

Appearing via video link from Wakefield prison, Worboys, wearing spectacles and a light grey and green shirt, pleaded guilty to two counts of administering a stupefying or overpowering drug with intent to commit rape or indecent assault.

He also admitted two counts of administering a substance with intent to commit a sexual offence under the Sexual Offences Act.

The first victim was picked up in Worboys’ taxi after leaving a bar.

All the women made their allegations to police in early 2018, but the offences dated back to between 2000 and 2008 in London.

Grey-haired Worboys spoke only to confirm his identity and enter his guilty pleas.

The court heard the maximum sentence faced by Worboys was life in prison.

Mrs Justice McGowan adjourned sentencing to September 2 for a report to be prepared on Worboys’ history of offending and dangerousness.

She said: “This is a case on which the public interest is better represented by the probation service putting forward a complete history.”

She ordered the defendant to be produced in court at the next hearing, saying: “This is a case where the public might expect the defendant to be sitting in the dock.”

At his first trial at Croydon Crown Court in 2009, jurors were told Worboys picked up his victims in London’s West End and plied them with champagne laced with sedatives on the pretext of celebrating a lottery or casino win.

Worboys, originally from Enfield, was convicted of 19 offences including one count of rape, five sexual assaults, one attempted assault and 12 drugging charges.

He was jailed for at least eight years but was told he would be held in custody as long as he was deemed a danger to the public.

Last year, the Parole Board ruled he should remain in prison citing his “sense of sexual entitlement” and a need to control women.

Police believe Worboys may have carried out more than 100 rapes and sexual assaults on women in London between 2002 and 2008.

At an earlier hearing in the latest case, prosecutor Jonathan Polnay said: “The allegation is that in 2000 or 2001 (the first victim) left a bar in Dover Street and hailed a taxi. The prosecution case is the driver of that black cab was this defendant.

“He told her he had won money on the horses and was celebrating and claimed he had been a stripper with the Chippendales.

“He offered champagne and invited her to celebrate. She agreed.

“This defendant pulled over on a side road off the A40 served an alcoholic drink in a plastic cup, which she drank. That is her last memory that evening.

“She woke up the next day naked with her clothes left in a trail on the way to her bed.”

The prosecutor continued: “In the late 2000s when there was considerable publicity about this defendant when he stood trial for a number of sexual offences she recognised the defendant as the taxi driver who had picked her up and in due course on December 13 2018 she picked him out in an identity parade.

“It is therefore the prosecution case this defendant did in fact administer a drug of sorts that caused her to lose consciousness.

“All his previous convictions relate to a very particular, identical modus operandi – picking up women in taxis, claiming he had won money gambling, offered alcohol laced with a form of sedative.”

Mr Polnay added the second complainant was a university student in London in 2003 when she was targeted after leaving a nightclub on New Oxford Street in what was “an identical method not only to the first count but a number of previous convictions and allegations three and four”.